Art in America Magazine (August 8, 2023) – The issue features Fall 2023: Icons – Artists who have made an impact, plus The Ruscha Effect, Cave_bureau, Pippa Garner, Marfa vs. Naoshima, Françoise Gilot, and more.
Suzanne Jackson: a history drawing-cracked wall, 2016–19.PHOTO TIMOTHY DOYON/COURTESY ORTUZAR PROJECTS, NEW YORK
Suzanne Jackson, whose work a history drawing-cracked wall (2016–19) features on the cover of the Fall 2023 issue of Art in America in a detail of the larger work shown here in full, told A.i.A. the backstory of her creation from her home in Savannah, Georgia. (Jackson is also the subject of a feature profile in the same issue.)
As told to A.i.A. The “history” in history drawing is thehistory of making the drawing. Over the three years I was working on it—it’s a big drawing—the whole process just happens from day to day: you’re adding something new, building it, working through composition and how elements come into the spaces in different ways. Each time you come back to work on it, something new has happened in your life.
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (1843 magazineAugust 7, 2023): A special edition of Editor’s Picks from The Economist’s summer double issue. This week, we take a deep dive into how Ukraine’s virtually non-existent navy sank the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea.
The bleeding edge … LookX uses a piece of crumpled paper as a prompt to create buildings in the style of Frank Gehry (left) and Zaha Hadid (right). Composite: Tim Fu
It’s revolutionizing building – but could AI kill off an entire profession? Perhaps not, finds our writer, as he enters a world where Corbusier-style marvels and 500-room hotels are just a click away
Oliver Wainwright – The Guardian (August 7, 2023):A handful of little green blocks flashes up on the screen, filling a building site with a neat grid of uniform cubes. One second they form rows of towers, next they morph into low-rise courtyards, then they flip back into long slender slabs, before cycling through hundreds of other iterations, in a hypnotic high-speed ballet of bristling buildings.
“You don’t even have to do much” … Patrik Schumacher-generated designs for ZHA using Midjourney. Photograph: Zaha Hadid Architects
I watch this while on a Zoom call with Wanyu He, an architect based in Shenzhen, China, and the founder of XKool, an artificial intelligence company determined to revolutionise the architecture industry. She freezes the dancing blocks and zooms in, revealing a layout of hotel rooms that fidget and reorder themselves as the building swells and contracts. Corridors switch sides, furniture dances to and fro. Another click and an invisible world of pipes and wires appears, a matrix of services bending and splicing in mesmerising unison, the location of lighting, plug sockets and switches automatically optimised. One further click and the construction drawings pop up, along with a cost breakdown and components list. The entire plan is ready to be sent to the factory to be built.
Literary Review of Canada – September 2023: The September issue features Michael Taube on Jason Kenney, the life of Jack Austin, the legacy of a horse racing dynasty, our tenacious statistics bureau, memories of melmac, and Vincent Lam’s latest—with a cover from Alexander MacAskill.
The question is asked all the time, usually in unpoetic moments; it’s an occupational hazard of teaching literature. There I’ll be at the clinic, sinuses on fire, when sure enough the doctor asks, “What’s your favourite book?” My practised answer, no hemming and hawing, is Moby-Dick. Everyone’s heard of it, and it sounds reassuringly substantial. (No one wants to hear a professor say Twilight.) “Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience,” I’ll mumble to myself as I walk out with my prescription.
From the start, women were at the center of the demonstrations that swept Iran last year. Schoolgirls emerged as an unexpected source of defiant energy.
One morning this past winter, the students at a girls’ high school in Tehran were told that education officials would arrive that week to inspect their classrooms and check compliance with the school’s dress code: specifically, the wearing of the maghnaeh, a hooded veil that became a requirement for schoolgirls in the years after the Iranian Revolution. During lunch, a group of students gathered in the schoolyard. A thirteen-year-old in the seventh grade, whom I’ll call Nina, pressed in to hear what was being said. At the time, mass protests against the government were raging across the country; refusing to wear the veil had become a symbol of the movement. An older girl told the others that it was time for them to join together and make a stand.
The twenty-nine-year-old musician pursues technical, rather than emotional, manipulation with her instrument. She can coax from it the sounds of an accordion, a drum, or a string orchestra.
“Do you listen to Sudan Archives?” Most of the time, but not every time, the response to this question is one of confusion. How can one listen to the archives of a country? Sudan Archives is, in fact, a twenty-nine-year-old musician—a singer, rapper, producer, arranger, lyricist, and violinist. She creates a “fiddle-punk sound,” as she describes it, that blends folk, ambient, soul, house, and whatever other tradition she feels is available for the taking. Sudan (the name that her colleagues, her fans, and, increasingly, her intimates call her) begins composing by striking a riff on one of her five violins, which she uses differently from most other American producers.
The Hunt family owns one of the largest private oil companies in the country. Leah Hunt-Hendrix funds social movements that want to end the use of fossil fuels.
Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures.
Insider Business (August 6, 2023) – The US has sent Ukraine millions of 155mm rounds since the war started, including cluster bombs. But there’s a global shortage of 155 shells, and some are afraid that the US is depleting its stockpile. We visited the Scranton Ammunition Plant to see how common shells are made.
Video timeline:0:00 Intro 0:52 Why 155s are so important in Ukraine 2:40 How 155mm shells are made 4:20 History of 155mm shells 4:53 Other expensive weapons NATO has sent Ukraine 5:51 How America is sending cluster bombs during shortage
American Heritage Magazine (August 2023) – This World War II issue features ‘Was the Bomb Necessary?’; Struggling to End the War; What were the Japanese Thinking?; Hersey Uncovers the Horror, The Bomb’s Toxic Legacy, and more…
American bombings in Japan, such as the firebombing of Tokyo during Operation Meetinghouse on March 10, 1945, left approximately 84,000 civilians dead. Photo by Ishikawa Koyo
In the spring of 1945, American bombing raids destroyed much of Tokyo and dozens of other Japanese cities, killing at least 200,000 people, without forcing a surrender.
After the bloody battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, planners feared as many as two million American deaths if the US invaded the Japanese homeland.
By the summer of 1944, U.S. military power in the Pacific Theater had grown spectacularly. Beginning days after the D-Day invasion in France, American forces launched their largest attacks yet against the Japanese-held islands of Saipan on June 15, Guam on July 21, and Tinian on July 24. Situated 1,200 to 1,500 miles south of Japan in the crescent-shaped archipelago known as the Marianas, they were strategically important, defending the empire’s vital shipping lanes from Asia and preventing increased aerial attacks on the homeland.
Much of the debate over ending the war centered on the role of Emperor Hirohito, the “living deity,” after the conflict. Library of Congress
As defeat became inevitable in the summer of 1945, Japan’s government and the Allies could not agree on surrender terms, especially regarding the future of Emperor Hirohito and his throne.
As the Allied armies closed in on the German capital in 1945, the complications for ending the war in Europe paled, in comparison with the difficulty of forcing a Japanese surrender. For the Japanese military, the concept was unthinkable, a state of mind confirmed by the hundreds of thousands of Japanese servicemen who had already been killed, rather than giving up a hopeless contest.
For the Japanese leadership, the whole strategy of the Pacific war had been predicated on the idea that, after initial victories, a compromise would be reached with the Western enemies to avoid having to fight to a surrender. Switzerland was thought of as a possible neutral intermediary; so, too, the Vatican, for which reason a Japanese diplomatic mission was established there early in the war.
The Japanese government watched the situation in Italy closely, when General Pietro Badoglio became prime minister after the fall of Mussolini’s fascist regime, and remained in power after the Italian surrender in 1943. If Badoglio could modify unconditional surrender by retaining the government and Victor Emmanuel as king, then a “Badoglio” solution in Japan might ensure the survival of its imperial system.
Many writers are looking for ways to capture the everyday realities that the government keeps hidden — sometimes at their own peril.
By Han Zhang
On an August evening in 2021, the best-selling Chinese novelist Hao Qun, who writes under the name Murong Xuecun, was procrastinating in his one-bedroom apartment. He needed to be at Beijing Capital International Airport around 6 the next morning to catch a flight to London, but he found it hard to pack. Though Hao had a valid tourist visa to Britain, the Chinese government had kept tabs on him for years, and it was possible that he would be prevented from leaving; other public intellectuals had tried to travel abroad only to discover that they wereunder exit bans. Hao might have been packing for a life of exile or a futile trip to the airport.
For months a sort of aerosolized fury had hung over the Loudoun County school district. There were fights over Covid closures and mask mandates, over racial-equity programs, over library books. Now, in the weeks before the school board’s meeting on June 22, 2021, attention had shifted to a new proposal: Policy 8040, which would let transgender students choose pronouns, play sports and use bathrooms in accordance with their declared gender identity. In May, an elementary-school gym teacher announced that as a “servant of God,” he felt he could not follow the policy. The district swiftly suspended him — and just as swiftly, the antennae of conservative media outlets and politicians swiveled toward Loudoun County.
My Friend Is Trapped in a Nursing Home. What Can I Do?
The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on helping people who are institutionalized against their will.
World Economic Forum (August 5, 2023) – This week’s top stories of the week include:
0:15Half of Gen Z & Millenials live paycheck to paycheck – A new survey asked young people their biggest concerns. The cost-of-living crisis came out top. Many say they’ve been forced to take on side jobs to make ends meet or postpone big life decisions such as buying a house. And the extra stress is taking its toll. 46% of Gen Zs and 39% of millennials feel anxious at work all or most of the time and levels of burnout are on the rise. Their second biggest concern is unemployment.
1:51This start-up recycles household batteries – The Better Battery Company sells batteries in special packaging. Its batteries are white at the positive end and blue at the negative. Inside the box, the batteries are arranged in rows with the white end upturned. When each battery runs out, you put it back in the box the other way up so it’s easy to see which are used and which are new. When the box is filled with spent batteries, you return it using a free postage label and the Better Battery Company sends them off to be recycled.
3:01AI translates K pop hits into 6 languages – K-pop stars have recorded songs in Japanese and English before but a simultaneous 6-language release is a global first. Right now, the pronunciation correction process takes ‘weeks or months’, according to HYBE. But one day, AI could translate songs in real-time. This isn’t the only way AI is changing the music industry. Streaming platforms use AI to analyse users’ listening habits to pick the perfect playlist AIs are even composing their own music or being employed as collaborators.
4:48New airline tires can cut pollution – Airless tyres could cut pollution and make punctures a thing of the past. Made of shape memory alloy, these tyres are puncture-proof, sustainable, and easier to recycle.
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The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.
‘A novelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery,’ reflects the beleaguered hero of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged car crash.
London Review of Books (LRB – August 5, 2023) – But really, as Pinfold goes on to say, ‘most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters – Dickens and Balzac even – were flagrantly guilty.’ Pinfold is by admission a self-portrait, so Waugh must have expected readers to speculate on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself.
In 1958, a Cambridge don called Frederick J. Stopp produced a study of Waugh – uniquely, Waugh himself gave ‘generous assistance’ – which warmly endorsed the idea that he had basically ‘two books in his armoury’, the first featuring the ‘contrast between sanity and insanity’ and the second ‘sanity venturing out into the surrounding sphere of insanity, and defeating it at its own game’.
Whether this particular dualism had Waugh’s approval is unclear, but either way it doesn’t seem entirely satisfactory since the two alternatives look like variants of the same thing. Less well-disposed readers have thought that Waugh’s books divided on much more rudimentary lines: the good ones, which are funny, and the bad ones, which are pious.
There is the string of brilliant, brittle social comedies in the 1930s, and then there is whatever started happening with the publication in 1945 of Brideshead Revisited. Stopp reported, presumably with his master’s sanction, that ‘Mr Waugh’s reputation among the critics has hardly yet recovered from the blow.’ Brigid Brophy had the best joke: ‘In literary calendars, 1945 is marked as the year Waugh ended.’
Insider Business
Boomers Daily 